The present invention relates generally to seafood dressing apparatus, and more particularly to a hand-held seafood dressing tool which is especially adapted to cleave a headless shrimp to permit the easy removal of its shell, legs, and "vein." The tool of the present invention may also be used to trim or dress other types of seafood, for example, lobster, crab, catfish, or the like.
One of the most versatile, delectable, and widely enjoyed seafoods is the shrimp. Boiled shrimp, whether heaped on a platter or delicately arranged in a cocktail, served with appropriate condiments such as drawn butter or tangy cocktail sauces, delight millions. Millions more savor the flavor of sauteed, batter-dipped, stir-fried, or tempura style shrimp. Add to this the seemingly endless variety of shrimp dishes and regional accents, from curries to etoufees to gumbos, from Far East to Gulf Coast, and one can well appreciate the enormous popularity of this tiny crustacean.
The popularity of the shrimp has reached all-time highs of late in spite of the relative difficulty encountered in its preparation. Such preparation typically requires the shrimp to be dressed or cleaned first, which usually entails deheading the shrimp, peeling off the shell and legs, and removing the longitudinally extending intestine or "vein." This dressing procedure can be very time-consuming, especially when done by hand, as is typically required when fresh shrimp are prepared at home or in small-scale commercial environments. Large-scale commercial enterprises usually have at their disposal automatic, high-speed, high-volume deheading, cleaning, and sorting equipment which eliminates most of the manual labor from shrimp dressing operations. Such commercial equipment is too large, complicated, and expensive for use by home shrimp consumers and many small businesses, however, so such persons who wish or need to dress their own shrimp must resort to manual techniques.
One technique for manually dressing a shrimp involves inserting a slender knife blade or other similar implement into the proximal end of the shrimp's body, i.e., the end opposite the tail, after the head has been removed and slicing the body transversely from its midportion through its back and shell. The shell and legs are then peeled away, and the shrimp's body is separated longitudinally along the slice, which exposes the vein. The vein is then grasped and pulled out.
A significant problem with the foregoing manual dressing procedure is that the slicing operation can be very dangerous. The shrimp are typically wet and slippery when dressed, often leading to mishandling of the shrimp or slicing implement during the slicing step and sometimes resulting in injury to the operator. The potential for injury increases as the operator tries to speed up operations, as is sometimes called for, and uses less care and caution than he would otherwise exercise. Although special manual shrimp dressing tools have been proposed in the past as alternatives to a paring knife or the like, they suffer from the same drawback. Such tools typically require the operator to slice the shrimp with a relatively sharp blade, a motion which carries with it the possibility of mishandling the shrimp, the blade, or both, and thereby exposing the operator to injury.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a shrimp dressing tool which overcomes the problems of prior art manual shrimp dressing tools and techniques referred to above by providing a manual shrimp dressing tool which does not require the shrimp to be cut with a slicing motion, but rather enables the shrimp to be snipped open with a scissor-like operation. It is another object of the present invention to provide a shrimp dressing tool which replaces the slicing step of the manual technique referred to above with a safe, efficient snipping step which virtually eliminates the possibility of injury in manually dressing shrimp.
It is another object of the present invention to provide such a shrimp dressing tool which is fast and easy to use, durable, and reliable. It is yet another object of the present invention to provide a shrimp dressing tool which is simple and inexpensive to manufacture.